Two articles from Le Monde:
By Edgar Morin, Sami Naïr and Danièle Sallenave
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Israël-Palestine: le cancer"
(Edgar Morin, Sami Naïr and Danièle Sallenave, Le Monde, 2002/06/03)
By Françoise Giroud
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Cette Shoah qui ne passe pas"
(Françoise Giroud, Le Monde, 2002/06/13)
By Edgar Morin, Sami Naïr and Danièle Sallenave
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Israël-Palestine: le cancer"
(Edgar Morin, Sami Naïr and Danièle Sallenave, Le Monde, 2002/06/03)The Middle East is the Seismic Area of the Planet where East and West, North and South, Rich and Poor, Secular and Religious Collide.
The Arab-Israeli cancer is based on a territorial pathology: the foundation of two nations in a single land, the source of two political pathologies, one born of domination and the other, of deprivation. It has grown, on the one hand, out of a sort of historical anguish of a people persecuted in the past and of their geographical insecurity, and on the other hand, out of the present persecution of a people deprived of any political rights.
"From yesterday's oppressed, tomorrow's oppressor,” wrote Victor Hugo. Israel presents itself as the spokesman for the Jewish victims of a an age-old persecution culminating in the Nazi attempt at extermination. Its birth, attacked by its Arab neighbors, came close to being its death. Since its birth, Israel has become a formidable regional power, benefiting from the support of the United States and equipped with Nuclear arms.
And still, Sharon claimed to be fighting for Israel's survival by oppressing and asphyxiating the Palestinian population, by destroying its schools, archives, finance offices, by eviscerating houses, destroying irrigation ditches and proceeding in Jenin with a carnage the scale of which it is forbidden to know.
The survival argument can only have acted to reawaken in Israelis the anxieties of 1948, the specter of Auschwitz, by giving an abolished past a hallucinatory presence. Thus, the new Intifada has aroused an anxiety that lead the reconquistador Sharon to power.
In reality, Sharon is compromising Israel's chances for survival in the Middle East while believing he is assuring Israeli security in the immediate by the use of terror. Sharon is ignorant of the fact that today's triumph prepares tomorrow's suicide. In the short term, Hamas is enacting Sharon's policies, but seen from a distance, it is Sharon who is enacting the policies of Hamas. If, up to a point, the Intifada has pushed Israel to negotiate, beyond this point, it has reawakened the anguish felt by the prey, exasperated by the suicide attacks, and pitiless repression seems a just response to the threat. If no exterior force prevents it, the Israel of Sharon is at the very least heading toward the bantustanization of the severed Palestinian territories.
It is the knowledge of having been the victim that allows Israel to become the Palestinian peoples' oppressor. The word "Shoah," which singularizes the Jewish vicimized fate and makes all the others banal (those of the Gulag, the gypsies, the enslaved blacks, the Indians of America), becomes the legitimacy of a colonialism, of an apartheid and ghettoization for the Palestinians.
Victim awareness obviously carries a unilateral view of the situation and the events.
At the beginning of Zionism, the phrase "a landless people for a land without people" hid the prior Palestinian population. The Jews' right to a nation hid the Palestinians' right to their nation.
The Palestinian refugees' right of return is today seen, not as a right symetrcial with that of those Jews who have never lived in Palestine, but at once as a sacrilege and a request for the demographic suicide of Israel, while it might have been considered a reparation with negotiable terms.
It is horrible to kill civilians according to a principle of collective guilt, as suicide attacks do, but this is a principle applied by Israel, from the time of Sabra and Shatila and of south Lebanon, until today and, alas, probably tomorrow, in striking civilians, women and children, and in destroying the houses and crops of the family's of bombers. Palestinian civilian victims are currently between 15 and 20 times more numerous than Israeli victims. Must pity be exclusively reserved for some and not for others?
Israel sees its State terrorism against Palestinian civilians as self-defense and sees only terrorism in Palestinian resistance. Unilateralism blames Arafat alone for the failure of the last negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority: it obscures the fact that, since the Oslo accords, colonization has been constantly pursued in the occupied territories and views a restricted and parceled restitution of the occupied territories, including maintaining the colonies and the Israeli control of the Jordan valley as a "generous offer."
The complex history of the negotiations is erased by the unilateral view of this "generous offer" that met with a categorical rejection, and the interpretation of this supposed rejection as the wish to destroy Israel.
Unilateralism hides the infernal dialectic of repression-attack, itself fed by the extremists on either side. It masks the fact that the Sharon's visit to the Mosques Esplanade could only reinforce the vicious cycle that favors the worst on either side.
The diabolic circle in which any gain for the worst of one party is a gain for the worst on the other has lent power to the nationalist-fundamentalist clain in Israel, placed officers from the colonies at the head of the IDF, transformed elements of this army of reoccupation into army rabble plundering and killing sometimes to point of massacre (Jenin). It has enlarged the influence and establishment of fanatic religious movements among the Palestinian youth.
Of course, there is also a Palestinian unilateralism, but for the most part, since the abandonment by the PLO charter of the principle of eliminating Israel, the Palestinian Authority has recognized its occupier's existence as a sovereign nation that the latter as yet refuses it in return. Sharon has always rejected the "peace for land" principle, never recognized the Oslo accords and considered Rabin to be a traitor.
In the West, the media talk endlessly of the Arab-Israeli war; but this false symmetry hides the disproportion of means, the disproportion of deaths, the war of tanks, helicopters, missiles against rifles and Kalashnikovs. The false symmetry hides the inequality of force and simple truth that the conflict pits occupiers who are worsening their occupation against the occupied who are worsening their resistance.
The false symmetry hides the obvious fact that law and justice are on the side of the oppressed. It puts the two sides on an even keel, while one is waging war on another that does not have the means to do wage it and only offers sporadic acts of resistance or terrorism. By the same token, there is the false symmetry between Sharon and Arafat, one, master of a formidable power, capable of defying the United Nations and the (of course, half-hearted) objections of the United States, the other, increasingly powerless. A sinister farce consists in asking Arafat to prevent attacks all while at the same time preventing him from acting.
One is hard pressed to imagine that a nation of fugitives, descended of the people persecuted longest in the history of humanity, having been subjected to the worst humiliations and the deepest contempt, should be able to transform itself in two generations into a "dominating and self-assured people" and, with the exception of an admirable minority, a contemptuous people taking satisfaction in humiliating others.
The media do not properly portray the multiple and incessant signs of contempt, the multiple and incessant humiliations undergone at the checkpoints, in houses and streets. This logic of contempt and humiliation is not unique to Israelis, its belongs to all occupations in which the conqueror sees himself as superior in the face of a sub-human people. And, at the first sign of movement or rebellion, the dominator proves pitiless. It is just that Israel should remind France of its colonial repression during the war of Algeria: but this shows that Israel is doing for the Palestinians at the very least what France did in Algeria. In the latest re-conquering of the West Bank, the IDF gave itself over plunder, gratuitous destruction, homicides, executions in which the chosen people behave as a superior race. It is understandable that this degrading situation should endlessly give rise to new resisters, including new human bombs. He who sees only the tanks and cannons, but does not see the contempt and humiliation, has only a one-dimensional view of the Palestinian tragedy.
The word "terrorism" was sullied by all occupiers, conquerors, colonialists, to describe national resistances. Some among them, as in the time of the Nazi occupation of Europe, have surely included a terrorist component, that is to say, in principally striking civilians. But it is not right to reduce a national resistance to its terrorist component, however great it may be. And, above all, there is no common measure between a clandestine terrorism and a State terrorism with massive weaponry. Just as there is a disproportion of arms, there is a disproportion of terrors. Must the horror and indignation felt before the civilian victims massacred by a human bomb disappear when the victims are Palestinian and massacred by inhuman bombs?
One must not fear contemplating these young men and women who have become human bombs. Of course, despair has spurred them on but this component is not enough. There is also a very strong desire for revenge which, in its so deep and archaic logic, especially in the Mediterranean, requires that vengeance should be taken, not necessarily on the author of the infamy but on his community. It is also an act of absolute rebellion, in which the child who has seen the humiliation suffered by his father, his family, has the feeling of restoring a lost honor and at last regaining his own dignity and freedom in a murderous death.
Finally, there is the exaltation of the martyr, who, in a sacrifice of his own person, feeds the cause of the emancipation of his people. Obviously, behind these acts, there is a political/religious organization, which provides explosives, strategy and comfort through the indoctrination of the will to martyr and the lack of remorse. And the strategy of human bombs is very effective at scuttling any compromise, any peace with Israel, in a way such as to preserve the chances for a future elimination of the State of Israel. The human bomb, an extreme existential act on the level of an adolescent, is also a political act on the level of an extremist organization.
And here is the incredible paradox. The Jews of Israel, descended of an apartheid named the ghetto, are ghettoizing the Palestinians. The Jews, who were humiliated, despised, persecuted, are humiliating, despising and persecuting the Palestinians. The Jews, who were the victims of a pitiless order are imposing their pitiless order on the Palestinians. The Jewish victims of inhumanity are displaying a terrible inhumanity. The Jews, scapegoats for every evil, are "scapegoating" Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, made responsibe for attacks that they prevent them from preventing.
A new wave of anti-Judaism, from out of the Israeli-Palestinian cancer, has spread throughout the Arab-Islamic world, and a planetary rumor even assigns blame for the destruction of the two towers of Manhattan to a Judeo-American fraud to justify its repression agains the Islamic world.
For their part, the Israeli neighbors shout "Death to Arabs" after an attack. An anti-Arabism is spreading throughout the Jewish world. Their "communitarian" leaders proclaim themselves representatives of the Jews in the Western countries tend to close the Jewish world in on itself in an unconditional fidelity to Israel.
The dialectic of the two hatreds that sustain each other, that of the two contempts, that of the dominant Israeli over the colonized Arab, but also the new anti-Jewish contempt feed with all the ingredients of classic European anti-Semitism, is in the process of being exported. With the inflammation of the the situation in the Israel-Palestine, the double intoxication, anti-Jewish and Judeo-centric, will arise everywhere the two Jish and Muslim populations coexist. The Israeli-Palestinian cancer is metastasizing all over the world.
The French case is significant. Despite the war of Algeria and its aftermath, despite the war in Iraq and despite the Israeli-Palestinian cancer, Jews and Muslims peacefully coexist in France.
Nevertheless, a segregation is beginning. A deaf rancor against the Jews identified with Israel is smoldering among the Arab youth. On their side, the so-called communitarian Jewish organizations are maintaining the Jewish exception and the unconditional solidarity with Israel at the heart of the French nation.
This pitiless repression directed by Sharon which has caused mental anti-Judaism to resort to the most virulent act of hatred, the attack on the holiness of the synagogue and the cemetery. But this abets the Likud strategy: to show that the Jews are not at home in France, that anti-Semitism has returned, to incite them to leave for Israel. Must we not rather, invoke the French idea of citizenship as a means for fraternization among Jews and Muslms?
Is there a way out? An apparently inextinguishable hatred is at the bottoms of the hearts of of all the Palestinians and carries with it the wish to make Israel disappear. Among the Israelis, the contempt is increasingly hainous and seems equally inextinguishable. But the secular hatred among the French and Germans, worsened by the second world war, was able to evaporate in twenty years. Grand gestures of the recognition of the dignity of the other can, especially in the Mediterranean basin, change things.
Semites (let us not forget that more than 40% of the Israelis of today come from Arab countries) may well one day recognize their neighboring identities and languages, their common God. Will the enormity of the punishment reigning down on the heads of a people guilty of seeking its liberation ever evoke something other than timid objections from the world? Will the UN be able to decide on a peacekeeping force? Sharon can only be forced to abandon his political aims.
On 11 September, there was an electroshock that has, on the contrary, encouraged it. The American "War on Terror" has permitted him to include the Palestinian resistance with the terrorism that is the enemy of the West, in such a way as to make the Israeli-Palestinian head-to-head become a face-to-face, not between two nations but among to religions and civilizations, and to places this from then on in the context of a crusade against fundamentalist barbarism.
The inverse electroshock has in fact arrived. It is the Saudi offer of the definitive recognition of the State of Israel by all Arab countries in exchange for the return to the 1967 borders, in accordance with all UN resolutions. This offer would not only allow for a general peace among nations but also for a religious peace which would be sealed by the country in charge of the holy sites of Islam. One can therefore imagine an international conference to arrive at an agreement carrying an international guarantee.
At any rate, the United States, whose responsibility is overwhelming, have the means to decisive pressure by threatening to suspend their aid, and the means to a decisive guarantee by signing a protection agreement with Israel.
The problem is not only Middle-Eastern. The Middle East is a seismic area of the planet where East and West, North and South, Rich and Poor, secular and religious collide. It is these antagonisms that the Israeli-Palestinian cancer seek to unleash on the planet. These metastases are already spreading throughout the Islamic world, the Jewish world, the Christian world. The problem is not only a matter wherein truth and justice are inseperable. It is also the problem of a cancer that is eating away at our world and leading to a series of planetary catastrophes.
Edgar Morin is a sociologist, Sami Naïr is a Member of the European Parliament (Citizens Movement), Danièle Sallenave is a writer and senior lecturer at Paris-X-Nanterre university.
By Françoise Giroud
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Cette Shoah qui ne passe pas"
(Françoise Giroud, Le Monde, 2002/06/13)
With remarkable rapidity (starting with the first stone of the second Intifada), a striking reversal has come about. At last! We’re allowed to speak ill of Jews!
Even if that old brigand Arafat talks twaddle, saying there was never any Jewish temple in Jerusalem, the Palestinian cause is unimpeachable. In the end, a Palestinian state has to be created and be able develop in respect and peace. We'll never say otherwise - save one proviso: murdering civilians every day, women, children in packs by means of suicide-men trained for this end does not arouse sympathy, even if this seems not to bother anyone among the many who know of only one guilty party in this awful conflict: Israel.
My aim is not to exonerate the Israelis of their long blindness, of a long arrogance toward their next-door neighbors, but to try to comprehend how they have become in the eyes of the French, in particular the intellectuals who reportedly think before writing, exclusive targets of reprobation if not hatred (Le Monde 4 June, Danièle Sallenave, Edgar Mori and Sami Naïr).
I believe that the whole of Christian peoples never bought the Shoah. That its relatively tardy revelation, its scale, its hallucinatory meticulousness and above all the character of systematic and gratuitous annihilation of an entire people have caused a shock much more profound that most admit. Not out of any particular sympathy for the victims but because the "final solution" forced even the most feckless to discover that man was perhaps intrinsically evil and God intrinsically distracted.
Humanity has of course known other exterminations but not comparable ones. We have exterminated enemies, adversaries, warriors, occupiers of land to be conquered. The French, as for them, exterminated the Protestants, tortured the Algerians. The Americans massacred the Indians. The Soviets massacred in every direction: the list goes on and on. But never had man methodically exterminated other men without reason, by caprice, as it were, and by the millions.
I think this revelation of evil at the heart of European men, raised for generations in Christian faith and running wild with abandon was intolerable, unbearable, suffocating. To my eyes, it is for this reason that those we call negationists deny in the face of every proof the reality of the Shoah. Logically, in so far as they declare themselves avowed enemies of the Jews they should rejoice at seeing so many disappear in one blow and credit this hygienic act to national-socialism.
But those who deny it can stand no more than the others that it should have come to pass. And as the years go by, everyone carries with him, with anxiety, and sometimes with irritation, his small share of guilt for an extermination, most remarkable in history because it was pointless. Because it is not the nth misfortune of the Jews that history has revealed but that of which contemporary, cultivated, policed, educated man is capable, and by extension ourselves. "Each time we killed a Jew during the war," said a moralist, "it was Jesus that we killed, the first among them."
So what is happening to-day? The chance to transmogrify the face of the Jewish martyr into the Jewish executioner. To void that recurring guilt which overcomes one to liberate the small store of anti-Semitism which we everyone discovers in the cradle.
With a remarkable rapidity (with the first stone of the second Intifada), a striking reversal has come about which would be inexplicable without the context in which it occurs. At last! We are allowed to speak ill of the Jews! "Anti-Semitic, me? Don't insult me. But that Palestinian child who died before our eyes on the television, who killed him? Who?" Above all, have no discussion. Feeling is not discussed. Neither is the natural desire to ally oneself with the weaker side.
I don't like the fact that Palestinian children are killed anymore than the next woman. I, too, am scandalized that Israel refused a fact-finding commission on Jenine. I, too, can scarcely tolerate seeing Israeli soldiers lifting up the shirts of their prisoners to make sure they're not wearing explosives belts or marking their forearms with numbers.
But in the macabre race in the number of dead that are burried each day that Israelis and Palestinians seem to be running - the Palestinians are winning. They are killing more. They kill a huge share of civilians, 400 since the beginning of the second Intifada, in the streets, buses, cafés, the places where the young dance, proof that Ariel Sharon’s anti-terrorist strategies are a deadlock.
In war, we forgive generals for making victories with the dead, not defeats. But in Paris, people of good taste count only the Palestinians. When we get to the others we no longer know how to count. Besides, they're bastards... The sons of a tortured people should know how to behave at the dinner table, I mean in war, and take blows without returning them. That is more or less what we hear and read in various places.
Nevertheless, taking blows without returning them seems a conduct for which we can no longer count on the Jews, in any circumstance. However, in stead of vainly showing their strength today, one would wish to make them show their intelligence and their so storied wisdom. "Chose life," says the message of Moses.
Françoise Giroud is an editorialist at the Nouvel Observateur, a writer and a former secretary of State.
[Posted 2003/01/07]
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